design-studio is Tiledesk's designer and needs a Tiledesk token to open

Three steps, and the URL has a typo in it

The README is explicit that Design Studio cannot run as a standalone application and is tightly integrated with the Tiledesk solution. The setup is three steps: have an authenticated Tiledesk environment, add a key `tiledesk_token` to your browser's local storage holding your authentication token, then open the project URL. The URL pattern it prints is `http://loalhost/#/project/<project_id>/chatbot/<chatbot-id>/blocks`, with localhost misspelled as loalhost. Copying it verbatim lands nowhere, and correcting it by hand is the first thing anyone running this has to do. Without a valid token and project, the designer has nothing to load.

1.40.15 in the manifest, one release tag from 2023

The version story is the first maintenance signal. `package.json` declares version 1.40.15 for the package `@tiledesk/cds`, published under MIT and not marked private. The only GitHub release is 1.0.6, dated 2023-11-25, which is a different numbering scheme entirely rather than an earlier point on the same one. The default branch was pushed on 2026-10-01, so the code is being worked on while the published release page still advertises a 2023 tag. A CHANGELOG.md exists at the root, but the release list is not the place to look for what changed, and the award badge in the README, Golden Kitty Awards 2023 for open source product of the year, points at the same 2023 vintage. Anyone tracking versions by tag rather than by the manifest will conclude the project is three years stale, and it may not be.

A two-stage build on Node 16 and nginx 1.14.1

The Dockerfile is short and worth reading for what it reveals. Stage one is `node:16.19.0-alpine`, running `npm ci` in a separate layer so dependency installs are cached, then `npm run ng build --configuration="prod" --output-path=dist`. Stage two is `nginx:1.14.1-alpine`, which receives a custom `nginx.conf`, has the default site removed, and gets the built assets copied into `/usr/share/nginx/html`. Both base images are long past end of life: nginx 1.14 predates 2019 and Node 16 has been unsupported since 2023. The start command is the interesting part: it runs `envsubst` over `design-studio-config-template.json` to write a real config file before exec'ing nginx, so runtime configuration is injected at container start rather than baked into the bundle. The builder stage also prints its own banner line during the build, which tells you the image is a thin static bundle rather than an application server: there is no Node process in the final image at all.

A conversation designer, not an agent framework

The feature list describes a graph-style conversation builder, and the individual blocks are the substance. You design flows by dragging and dropping, attach conditions for branching, and use a random-reply block that picks a different message on each iteration. Web Request connects the bot to external tools, with HubSpot CRM given as the example of saving every customer contact after a conversation. WhatsApp integration converts website conversations into WhatsApp chats, and email can be sent from the platform or triggered automatically. The ChatGPT integration covers two cases: reading answers out of a knowledge base for human-like replies, and recognising an urgent situation well enough to offer a handoff to a human agent. Around those sit the smaller claims: pre-designed conversations and administrative task automation, prototype flows for sketching before you commit, sharing images, GIFs and video inside a chat, and product recommendations derived from previous conversations or stated interest.

Angular 14, and unedited CLI boilerplate as documentation

Most of the README is the text Angular CLI generated when the project was scaffolded with version 14.2.6, and it was never replaced. The development section says to run `ng serve` and browse to port 4200, the build section says `ng build` writes to `dist/`, unit tests run through Karma, and the end-to-end section tells you to run `ng e2e` after first adding a package that implements end-to-end testing. No such package is in the dependency list, so end-to-end testing is not configured. The scripts themselves are thin wrappers, and the build carries a base-href of `./`:

ng build --output-path=dist --base-href ./

For a project people are meant to fork, documentation that stops at scaffolding is a real gap rather than a detail. What the repository does carry is a deploy_pre.sh and a deploy_prod.sh at the root, an angular.json, a karma.conf.js, three tsconfig files and an .editorconfig, so the deployment path is scripted even though the README does not describe it.

A 2022-vintage stack that still holds together

The dependencies describe an Angular 14 application: the Angular packages at 14.2.0 with Material and the CDK at 14.2.5, rxjs around 7.5, zone.js at 0.11.4, Karma with Jasmine for tests, Bootstrap 5.3 alongside Angular Material, ngx-translate for localisation, Quill for rich text, ng-select and a popover library for form controls. Two entries tell you more than the version numbers do. `firebase` is pinned at 7.24.0 and `jquery` at 3.7.1, which dates the codebase precisely, and the Tiledesk-specific package `@tiledesk/tiledesk-multi-worker` sits at `0.3.1-rc10`, a release candidate that a production deployment would be depending on.

Where Design Studio is the wrong tool

The coupling is the deciding factor. This is not a chatbot platform you can run and own; it is the editor for somebody else's platform, and the README says so. That makes it a poor fit for evaluating a bot builder, since you cannot see the interface without credentials for a running Tiledesk instance, and a poor fit for teams that want their conversation logic in version control as code. The project positions itself against Voiceflow and Botpress, both hosted services, so the comparison is with products you also cannot self-host. Help goes to a Discourse forum, feature ideas to a feedback board, and status to a public roadmap with In Progress, Planned and Under Review columns, which is more transparency about intent than most projects of this size offer. Support runs through a Discourse forum, a feedback board and a public roadmap, and the repository carries a 2023 Golden Kitty award for open source product of the year, which dates the recognition rather than the code.

Editorial conclusion

design-studio fits a team already running Tiledesk who wants to draw conversation flows instead of writing them. It does not fit an evaluation, a self-hosted chatbot stack without Tiledesk, or a project that needs its frontend on a current framework. Verify two things before adopting it: that your Tiledesk environment issues the token the designer expects, and that the version you install is the one you think, since the package sits at 1.40.15 while the only GitHub release is 1.0.6 from 2023.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. License: MIT
2. Project website
3. README
4. Releases
5. Tiledesk/design-studio on GitHub